Just ten minutes from our beach home, we saw the lusher greens of the north shore of Kaua’i, as the rain falls heaviest in the mountain rainforest in the distance. Below the mountains lie the taro fields.
Categories
Category: Respite
Categories
Waimea Canyon, Kaua’i
On a dead-end road, we looked out over this majestic scene.
Categories
Return from Kaua’i
We just returned from a short stay in Kaua’i and now back among the snow tunnels and crisp blue skies of Hokkaido.
The relentless roar of the ocean, the lush variation of tropical greens, the smell of citronella candles and the taste of fresh coconut meat linger inside me and I find it hard to be fully “home.”
Both places hold natural beauty in a different way, both places hold me in their embrace.
Categories
Silent hallways
Except for the atonal clanging and hissing of the ancient radiator and the hum of the electric fan heater and an inexplicable alarm’s buzzer (twice in three hours it has gone off for less than three seconds each), the day is an unusually quiet one.
The students are absent, like chalk erased from a blackboard, because preparations for the National University Entrance Examinations are underway. The only preparation I noticed so far was a lone woman from the Student Affairs division pulling down posters from the entrance walls, so my guess is that today is one of those secret days professors and administrators create for respite from the seagull noises of the young. The actual exams begin tomorrow.
The sky is out in that gorgeous bright winter blue, the same crisp pale blue O’Keefe captured in her painting of Minnesota birch trees, which I saw at the Minneapolis Metropolitan Museum of Art many moons ago. I assumed they are Minnesotan birches, but that just reveals my prejudice for the beauty of my birthplace. I don’t think this color can occur in a tropical world. It is painted with the serene hand of ice and snow.
Categories
Movement
It has been a while since I last wrote in this journal: there was glitch at the ubc site, and access was blocked, and, alas, I was also running around in headless chicken mode, so that is another reason for the lapse….
My son and I spent a night in Sapporo this weekend. We took a trip to the modern art museum, to a few galleries and past many undergound shops. I think there were at least six shopping arcades (maybe four blocks long each)?, and even though we didn’t see everything, we spent our evening just strolling past store displays, past endless items of clothing and toys and gadgets for sale, on sale, not on sale….
After an hour or so my mind numbed and I lost interest in buying anything, and then a strange compulsion came over me that I should at least examine things for their aesthetic values, as if each thing deserved some sort of critique (good design, bad fabric, cheap zipper, etc) until finally even my judicial game lost its allure and I wished to vanish into the sky. Instead I pushed my son, via stroller, through patches of loose snow, across glare ice roads, carried him up and down a series of stairwells until we reached our hotel.
On the 1.5 hour train trip back the next day, my son was shouting “Cars!” “Train!” over and over whenever we pulled away from a station. He also developed a routine of burbling his lips at the people sitting behind us (who thankfully found him amusing…). As the train compartment was silent except for my son’s one-man-show, it was a bit of an event. Although I secretly chuckled at his high jinks, I did make repeated efforts to calm him down, honestly I did. Children, however, have an energy that cannot be corked easily, and my son is always thrilled about riding trains. I did hope no one was too annoyed, however.
The year is new and I am optimistic that I will reside in a more creative space. I have hopes to make more paintings, poems, stories, essays, make anything really, and to do less practical sheeeeet. I felt the understandable need to be practical the past two years (feed son, dress son, change son, repeat, etc.), but I think it is time to find my inner life again. I hope you, too, my friends, can find a place and time to whittle on blocks of dreams.
Categories
The Sun
The sun has just come out of the clouds after a long, long hiatus. While snow has a brightness that is in some ways as blinding and as brilliant as the sun’s, ultimately living things have a bigger need for the sun and its power. The appearance of the sunlight brings the end to a somber song and a smile forms more easily.
I had been missing the sun without realizing it! How much better the world looks when a patch of blue sky appears and the sun opens its cyclop eye. Some might say the sun brings an illusion of hope, but I think the hope is no illusion. The sun does transform the world and gives it life, especially after reappearing from an extended holiday. The darkness heals us, and the light gives us the power to grow more.
At night I didn’t sleep well. Even with three blankets I shivered and I hated to move from the one spot I had semi-heated. Since yesterday the air has turned the corner toward that the type of cold that eats your flesh and stops the blood from pulsing through extremities.
As I shoveled snow this morning, my fingers disappeared at the tips first and then became shadows in the final space beneath the knuckles. I cannot enjoy shoveling as much because I love these hands and wish they would stay with me and help me with the work. I wonder if all the freezing my body has experienced–growing up in Minnesota and now again here in Asahikawa–will allow my flesh to stay fresh longer? How many times will I freeze before I become inedible and freeze-dried?
Never mind, the sun is here! It paints the side of the school building into a perfect white triangle of light. I can almost see the a, b,c written at each side. I am glad I don’t know what the given value is for any side. I don’t want to be logical today or to decipher a geometrical puzzle. I just want to face the sun, close my eyes, and accept the offering.
Categories
Sunset and honeybees
The dusty blues and greys of the sky, of the clouds, and of the buildings slowly dissolve into each other and in a few minutes all we see will become indistinguishable, except that trees turn blacker sooner than the rest of the world, at least now, right after sundown. (P.S. I returned from the bottom of this journal to tell you that everything melts eventually into one blackness).
Night enters early up here in the hinterlands. I can now see which professors remain at work on a Friday afternoon (assuming they have their electric lights on) and which ones have snuck out early. Four windows are bright squares of white light.
If I were an owl I could see the titles of the books lining their shelves, but since I am a mere human, all I can see is an inkling of what might be going on. In one office, some students are sitting around a table: pages of books are being flipped over occasionally, a girl leans over her books so that her hair falls like a theatre curtain, a professor with wild Einstein hair (yes, it is even white) stands in the corner with his arms akimbo, his mouth is moving like a ventriloquists’s dummy, and then a glimpse of a young man’s hunched grey jacket, and then a disembodied left hand flips a silver pen in circles and it gives off sparks.
I am really spying now, but if they looked across the courtyard, they would just as easily spy on me, eyeing them, with my two thick sweaters, left hand propping up my chin, and with white cup of tea nearby, but fortunately they wouldn’t see the remains of three (they were small, honest) chocolate chip cookies next to the cup.
At this moment I must also appear to be an earnest member of the steadfast worker bees, and this journal is my final honey for the day. Soon I, too, will sneak out into the night a bit early and then take my son somewhere he can run and jump around like a puppy in a field of dandelions. Well, that is purely figurative, but let’s say to the local gym’s kiddie room.
One more thought: How do bees make honey anyway? Well, the ‘glories’ of the internet led me to this page, and my favorite line is:
“Bees actually have two stomachs, their honey stomach which they use like a nectar backpack and their regular stomach.”
After you read it, would you choose to be a worker bee or a house bee? I’d rather be a worker bee with a nectar packback because at least I could visit all the colors and tender shapes of flowers and sip nectar all day; although having the house bees stick their tube-like tongues into my honey stomach to drain it afterwards doesn’t sound like much fun.
Happy weekend!
Categories
Osaka Liberty
A classic photo of Osaka city. This is a shot of America-mura, which (of course) has nothing to do with America at all.
